Of love and happiness

"...men who might have tower'd in the van
Of all the congregated world, to fan
And winnow from the coming steps of time
All chaff of custom, wipe away all slime
Left by men-slugs and human serpentry
Have been content to let occasion die
While they did sleep in love's Elysium."

I quote these words of Keats from memory.

But how true these words are! The lover is an unambitious person because he is a happy person. And happy people don't try to change the world. At most, they might fling a few arrows into the marketplace, and then idle around the beloved.

Thus, the 'movers and shakers' of the world are necessarily not lovers and not happy people. All that the beloved and the lover seek are peace, not tumult.

Perhaps I, too, might have gone into the fray but for the influence of love. Hence, my ardent desire for peace...May we all be at peace. Let lovers unite and marry and live happily ever after.

That is why western ideologies in my country - introduced by ambitious men and women with no love in their lives - disturb my peace because there's no peace in my motherland.

I would try and change it all were it not for the fact of my happiness. Happiness, after all, is the supreme good, and once somebody has achieved it, there's no persuading him to choose any other path.

Muslim women's satisfaction highest in the world

"Dahlia Mogahed, who overseas Gallup's research on Muslim opinion, has made some stark observations about that poll. There are, she notes, many Muslim countries where men and women alike are fed up with life. But of the ten places with the highest correlation between being female and (relatively) satisfied, nine are mainly Muslim: Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Bangladesh, Palestine, Jordon and Morocco. Ms. Mogahed says this reflects the travails of being a Muslim man as much as any blessing of being female. In traditional lands, where men expect to be breadwinners, many suffer the trauma of being jobless or doing hard, ill-paid work. Another factor, she thinks, is that one big source of female and child poverty in the West – single motherhood – hardly exists in Muslim societies."

- The Economist, July 14th 2007, page 62